We confess: As a newspaper, we have given short shrift to high school arts. That is changing.

We have already launched a blog called Youth Arts, which we intend to become the go-to destination for information about arts events and programs at high schools and community organizations throughout the area. There will be contributions from Times Union staff as well as — this is key — calendar items, stories, photos and videos submitted by community members. We see the blog as a place to visit for frequent updates posted by regular contributors at high schools and youth-arts organizations.

Check out http://blog. timesunion.com/youtharts to see how to participate and what’s online.

Coming next month is the Youth Arts page, a dedicated space on the second page of every Sunday’s Capital Region section, where we will print stories, photos and listings that reflect and celebrate the spectrum of artistic creativity exhibited by Capital Region young people. The age range for coverage is the teenage years; while the upper end has a firm cutoff of the senior year of high school, we’ll be flexible on the younger side, meaning contributions for middle school and even elementary age will be considered.

The Times Union, like media nationwide, for decades has dedicated significant space and staff time to covering high school sports while giving comparatively minimal attention to the arts studied and performed at those same schools.

There are reasons for this. While two-thirds of pupils in America’s 15,000 school districts take at least one arts course during high school, the number who participate in after-school or community programs like drama clubs or dance troupes drops to about 25 percent, a 2008 Rand Corp. study found. In contrast, about 7.5 million, or almost 55 percent, of U.S. high-schoolers take part in organized sports, according to the NCAA.

But high school sports receive vastly more than twice as much coverage as high school arts. At the Times Union, for example, there has long been at least one full-time staffer dedicated solely to writing about high school athletics; multiple photographers shoot and freelancers cover other games, and clerks compile scores for printed listings.

In contrast, the arts staff historically has written just a few stories per year about a production, project, program or person deemed to be of special interest; most of the events went unnoted, even in calendar listings.

We had our rationale, starting with the fact that there simply wasn’t space for those stories and listings. More abstractly, the arts lack the built-in narrative that makes sports so compelling — and more obvious a subject for regular coverage. Every game has the drama of victory or loss, players’ performances can be quantified, and each season becomes its own story arc, often involving heartbreak, triumph and redemption. The arts, in contrast, generally aren’t competitive — Mohonasen’s marching band can’t go out every Friday night and “beat” rivals any more than Albany High’s drama kids can “play” another school’s thespians weekly for a final score that is read on the late TV news or printed in small type in the paper.

Still, we can and should write about the arts in all their exciting diversity, their entertainment, their edification. The blog solves the space problem — it can hold as much as we and our contributors care to produce — and the Sunday page redresses a lapse left for far too long.

“Technology now enables us to … tap the knowledge of the people who know the topic best — those who are actively engaged in the music, theater and visual art created by our community’s young people,” said Times Union Editor Rex Smith.r